Chapter one: Ethics & Business McGraw-Hill/Irwin

Chapter Objectives After exploring this chapter, you will be able to:
1) Explain why ethics is important in the business environment;
2) Explain the nature of business ethics as an academic discipline;
3) Distinguish the ethics of personal integrity from the ethics of social responsibility
4) Distinguish ethical norms and values from other business-related norms and values
5) Distinguish legal responsibilities from ethical responsibilities
6) Explain why ethical responsibilities go beyond legal compliance
7) Distinguish ethical decision-making from other practical decision situations

Business ethics is a process of responsible decision-making

The scandals and ruin experienced since the Enron collapse were brought about by ethical
failures. We will discuss a decision-making model that can help individuals to understand
such failures and avoid future business and personal tragedies.
Why explore ethics in business?
Because Ethics Failures = Business Failures
Why is ethics important in the business environment?
Consider the range of people who were harmed by the collapse of Enron.
a) Stockholders lost over $1 billion in stock value.
b) Thousands of employees lost their jobs, their retirement funds, and their health care
benefits.
c) Consumers in California suffered from energy shortages and blackouts that were
caused by Enron’s manipulation of the market.
d) 4.Hundreds of businesses that worked with Enron as suppliers suffered economic loss
with the loss of a large client.
e) Enron’s accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, went out of business as a direct result. The
wider Houston community was also hurt by the loss of a major employer and
community benefact or.
f) 6.Families of employees, investors, suppliers were also hurt. Many of the individuals
directly involved will themselves suffer criminal and civil punishment, including
prison sentences for some.

Stakeholder Theory
 In a general sense, a business stakeholder will be anyone affected, for better or worse,
by decisions made within the firm.
  Stakeholder theory is a model of corporate social responsibility that holds that
business managers have ethical responsibilities to this broader range of stakeholders,
as opposed to a narrower view that the primary responsibility of managers is limited
to stockholders.
Why care about ethics?
 Unethical behavior creates financial and marketing risks.
 A company can go out of business, and its employees can go to jail, if no one is
paying attention to the ethical standards of the firm.
 A firm’s ethical reputation can provide a competitive advantage, or disadvantage.
Consumer boycotts give even the most skeptical business leader reason to pay
attention to ethics.
 Managing ethically can also pay significant dividends in organizational structure and
efficiency.
 Trust, loyalty, commitment, creativity, and initiative are just some of the
organizational benefits that are more likely to flourish within ethically stable and
credible organizations
Business Ethics as Ethical Decision-Making
 Decisions which follow from a process of thoughtful and conscientious reasoning will
be more responsible and ethical decisions. Responsible decision-making and
deliberation will result in more responsible behavior.
 The point of a business ethics course?
 To explore ethical behavior, to consider how human beings properly should live
their lives.
What is “ethics?”
 Ethics involves what is perhaps the most monumental question any human being can
ask:
o At its most basic level, ethics is concerned with how we act and how we live
our lives.
 Ethics is, in this sense, practical, having to do with how we act, choose, behave, do
things.
 Philosophers often emphasize that ethics is normative, in that it deals with our
reasoning about how we should act.
 Social sciences such as psychology and sociology also examine human decision-
making and actions, but these sciences are descriptive rather than normative.
 They provide an account of how and why people do act the way they do; as a
normative discipline, ethics seeks an account of how and why people should act,
rather than how they do act.
What is “ethics?” How should we live?
 This fundamental question of ethics can be interpreted in two ways.
 "We" can mean each one of us individually, or it might mean all of us
collectively.
 In the first sense, this is a question about how I should live my life, how I should
act, what I should do, what kind of person I should be.
 This meaning of ethics is sometimes referred to as morality, and it is the aspect of
ethics that we refer to by the phrase “personal integrity.”

Personal Responsibility vs. Social Responsibility?

 There will be many times within a business setting where an individual will need
to step back and ask:

What should I do? How should I act?

 In the second sense, “How should we live?” refers to how we live together in a
community.
 In this sense, business ethics is concerned with how business institutions ought to
be structured, about corporate social responsibility, about making decisions that
will impact many people other than the individual decision-maker.
 This aspect of business ethics asks us to examine business institutions from a
social rather than an individual perspective.
 We refer to this broader social aspect of ethics as decision-making for social
responsibility.
 In essence, managerial decision-making will always involve both aspects of
ethics.
o Each decision made by a business manager not only involves a personal
decision, but also involves making a decision on behalf of, and in the name
of, an organization that exists within a particular social, legal, and political
environment.
o Within a business setting, individuals will constantly be asked to make
decisions affecting both their own personal integrity and their social
responsibilities.
Ethical Norms and Values
Value:
Those beliefs that incline us to act or to choose in one way rather than
another.
 A company’s core values, for example, are those beliefs and principles that
provide the ultimate guide in its decision-making.
 There are financial, religious, legal, historical, nutritional, political, scientific, and
aesthetic values.
 Individuals can have their own personal values and, importantly, institutions also
have values.

Legal Responsibilities vs. Ethical Responsibilities

 The law provides a very important guide to ethical decision-making, but legal
norms and ethical norms are not identical nor do they always agree.
 Over the last decade, many corporations have established ethics programs and
hired ethics officers who are charged with managing corporate ethics programs.
 Much good work gets done by ethics officers, but it is fair to say that much of this
focuses on compliance issues. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act created a dramatic and
vast new layer of legal compliance issues.

How is ethical decision-making different from other decision-making?

 Ethics is a part of practical reason, reasoning about what we should do, as opposed
to theoretical reason, which is reasoning about what we should believe.
 Theoretical reason is the pursuit of truth, which is the highest standard for what
we should believe.
o According to this tradition, science is the great arbiter of truth. Science
provides the methods and procedures for determining what is true.
o Thus, the scientific method can be thought of as the answer to the
fundamental questions of theoretical reason: What should we believe?
Philosophical Ethics and Theories
 Is there a comparable methodology or procedure for deciding what we should do
and how we should act?
 There are guidelines that can provide direction and criteria for decisions that are
more or less reasonable and responsible:
Philosophical ethics.
o These traditions, or what are often referred to as ethical theories, explain
and defend various norms, standards, values, and principles that contribute
to responsible ethical decision-making.
 Ethical theories are patterns of thinking, or methodologies, to help
us decide what to do.